First published: 31st July 2008
You've heard of the Oscars, Palm Doors, 香港電影金像獎, Pulitzers, and Rory Awards. Every field of human endeavour needs to acknowledge its successes and failures - even terminal stupidity (the Darwin Awards). Since 2007, the Information Security field has had the Pwnie Awards and this years nominees for the second annual award have been announced.
The nine award categories include the Best Server and Client Side Bugs, Mass 0wnage, Most Innovative Research, and Most Epic Fail. The Best Song category probably has the greatest entertainment value, with clever lyrics, although there is an advertising component - especially for Kaspersky's "Packin' The K!" rap.
For the Lamest Vendor Response, Linus Torvalds has been categorised as a vendor for his kernel non-disclosure policy rant, though that seems to pale into insignificance compared to McAfee's refusal to categorise XSS as a vulnerability for their "Hacker Safe" certification program, or NXP's threat to sue Radboud University Nijmegen over a paper on fundamental flaws in Mifare Classic, the contactless smartcard used (as Oyster cards) on London's transport system.
The awards ceremony will be held at the BlackHat USA reception, Caesar's Palace, Las Vegas on August 6th.